VERBS AND OBJECTS IN SEMANTIC AGREEMENT: MINOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ENGLISH AND GERMAN THAT MIGHT SUGGEST A MAJOR ONE

Abstract

Even though not boasting overt and systematically used noun classifiers of the variety known as classificatory verbs, languages may still have predicates (co-)signalling particular categories of nominal classification (outside syntactic agreement). Standard examples are English verbs such as to bark/neigh/gallop requiring subjects which refer to particular animals, or otherwise classify their subject referents a being in the relevant respects comparable to the animals in question. I hope to demonstrate in this paper that semantic agreement of this kind, which has often figured in theoretical discussions about the structure of the lexicon and the interface of semantics and syntax, is not as unsystematic as is commonly assumed. Although there may be considerable cross-linguistic variation, this variation at least appears to be quantitatively patterned insofar as some languages (such as German) have relatively more instances of semantic agreement between verbs and objects than others (such as English). I suggest further that the incidence of semantic verb-object agreement is not a minor, isolated, and entirely unpredictable difference between individual languages, but correlates with the typology of the grammatical core relations of subject and object, and in particular with the object-differentiation characteristics of a language verbs and objects seem to agree more commonly in languages which give morphosyntactic, and in fact lexical, recognition to at least two semantically relatively specific types of core objects (such as direct and indirect object).